Whoa. It's February. Where did the time go?
The tank isn't looking great at the moment (more about that later) but the fish appear to be happy, insofar as I can tell. I haven't had extensive training in reading fish expressions - and their little fishy faces aren't terribly expressive to start with. But I think they're not grumpy. Apart from the Bristlenose, of course. But he's only happy when he's grumpy, so all is good.
Mentally I feel like I've levelled up. After a boss fight with sunlight and thread algae over in the cube, I got a pile of loot and some power ups. I'm now a level 2 aquascaper, which means I get harder algae to beat, the plants are all fussier, and I have less time to deal with it all. The rate things are going I don't think I'll ever make level 3. But that's ok. I play computer games badly. I'm used to dying a lot.
Anyhow, the loot. Courtesy of UKAPS sales forum, I upgraded from my Nicrew ClassicLed Plus to a Chihiros A901 plus. There were a couple of reasons for this. Firstly the Nicrew kept falling off the coasters during WCs (back in the annals of time you may recall I perched the Nicrew on some drinks coasters to give it extra height. It has not been what I would call a robust solution). Secondly, the Nicrew was only about 75 cm long, and the plants at the ends of my tank were really not growing particularly successfully. So I installed the Chihiros, and it didn't fit under the hood. About half an hour of hacksawing later it had much shorter legs and fitted just fine. To my astonishment it's not wobbly. I really don't understand that as I have the DIY skills of a horse. That's probably doing a disservice to horses.
Here it is!
I kicked that off running at 30%. An immediate benefit was that the timer that came with it doesn't reset every time there's a power cut. We get a lot of power cuts. Also, hypothetically - because I could turn it up much brighter - it should be easier to take good photos, right? Not so far, apparently
. A slight disbenefit was the BBA explosion. It turns out 30% was still too intense. I turned it down to 25%. When I checked earlier this evening my BBA had developed BBA, so I've turned it down again to 20%. I did a web search. It turns out the Nicrew is rated at 1,150 Lumens and the Chihiros at 14,200. Hmm. May yet have to turn it down further. In the mean time I'm slowly ramping up a bit of glut - slowly as I want the Vals to have time to acclimatise. The intent is lowering the light will stop re-occurrence, and the glut will kill off the existing incursion. The other effect of the extra light has been some GSA on the glass. Interestingly you can't see it with the naked eye, but it shows up beautifully in photos. I was a little outraged by this - after the first misplaced fit of enthusiasm a year and a half ago I've never cleaned the glass on this tank, and I'd completely forgotten how to. Eventually I realised that all those tools I'd enthusiastically purchased so many months ago ("Seven in one aquarium maintenance kit for all your fishy needs. £1.") were buried right at the back of the doodads drawer for a reason. So I dug out an expired credit card and reluctantly started cleaning. My aquarium glass is now a bit like the back seat window in the car on a cold day, with a little hole polished in the condensation to let you look out.
All this of course happened after I'd taken photos, rather than before. Be prepared for spotty photos.
On the plant front, I've had some winners and some losers. The Heteranthera zosterifolia (Star Grass), which grows like a weed in some of my other tanks, enjoys going black and shedding all its leaves in this one. The AR mini has also all died off. By way of comparison, a photo below of the AR mini in one of my other tanks - no one warned me you needed a tight lid because it would try and escape...
Limnophila sessiflora on the other hand is just as happy here as it is everywhere else, and needs to be put back into its corner on a regular basis. The Pogostemon is, ok, but I think I broke its spirit when I dismantled the Pogostemonster, and it's never been the same since. Here they both are.
Excitingly I've pruned my first crypt - the big bush of Wendtii Tropica you can see above was sprouting offspring all over the place. They are now floating in my potting shed, awaiting this weekend's new scape.
Quick interlude for a Panda Cory, because, well, Panda Cory!
And the final, possibly most exciting plant news is: The Return Of The Hydrocotyle! This was dead. I spent my first 9 months in the hobby painstakingly killing it. In the "plants" tab of my aquarium spreadsheet it is marked as a zero (where 4 is thriving and 0 is, well, dead). I've not seen it in this tank for six months, and then, boom! It reappears and is now happily interlacing itself through the Pgostemon. This leaves me in a quandary on how to update my spreadsheet. I don't have a Lazarus category.
To close, here is an arty tank shot, and, of course, the FTS.
Cheers,
Simon
OK I've been watching way too many Marvel films. We all piled into the cinema to watch the latest Spiderman, and duly sat through the end credits for the now mandatory extra scene. Then I got up to go, and my children all yanked me back down for the extra scene after the credits after the extra scene after the first lot of credits. So consider this your end-of-movie final scene.
I've been reading with interest the
Lean Dosing thread. In that,
@Hufsa directed us all towards a fab Vin Kutty video, and from there I found my way to the brilliant
Rotala Kill Tank thread over at the Barr Report (disclaimer - I've only read the first 3 hours of it, and am currently on page 30 of about 50). I've been taking extensive notes - obviously in my "ferts" tab rather than the "plants" one - and was even forced to start a new tab for memorable quotes. Despite not having read the whole thing I'm going to take the liberty of badly paraphrasing this epic of data and insight in one infogram:
Vin himself summarises by saying "
If you go back and read the 50+ pages of this journal, you should come away with the same conclusion. Lots of nutrients in the substrate with nothing in the water column is the easiest method. The most difficult method? High KH water + inert substrate + EI. Most other methods fall somewhere in between in difficulty."
Which explains quite a bit. Given this tank is, well, High KH, inert substrate and 20% EI (bearing in mind it's low tech). I've accidentally made a Rotala Kill Tank. Hey.
I'm rather pleased with myself. Vin did it in 50 pages, and I did it on my first day with some help from a chap in an LFS who (it turned out) also knew nothing about planted tanks. I am now determined to grow Rotala. I'm giving myself a challenge to succeed before the next Labour government (somewhere between 3 months and 30 years). I'm going to follow in the hallowed footsteps of
@plantnoobdude and
@John q, buy a Rotala (and on a matter of principle some Pinnatifida) and go for some form of low -N dosing and a pile of root tabs. Haven't worked out what yet though. I've still got another 20 pages to go first.
Cheers (again),
Simon